His camera chronicled the civil rights movement
Matt Herron, a photojournalist who vividly memorialized the most portentous and promising moments from the front lines of the 1960s civil rights movement in the Deep South, died Aug. 7 when a glider he was piloting crashed in Northern California. He was 89.
His wife, Jeannine Hull Herron, said Mr. Herron was flying his new self-launching glider (he had learned to fly at 70) when it crashed about 125 miles northwest of Sacramento, Calif. He died at the scene. The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating.
A child of the Depression, Mr. Herron assembled a team of photographers to capture the clashes between white Southerners and Black protesters, aided by their white Freedom Rider allies, as they sought to claim the rights they had been legally granted a century before.
Mr. Herron, who worked for newsmagazines, described himself as a “propagandist” for civil rights organizations, including the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which gave him rare behind-thescenes access to its members.
His photographs appeared in Life, Look, Newsweek and other magazines, and in books like “This Light of Ours: Activist Photographers of the Civil Rights Movement” (2012) and “Mississippi Eyes: The Story and Photography of the Southern Documentary Project” (2014).
In an oral history, Mr. Herron recalled the civil rights movement as a difficult but also a magical time.
“We embraced each other,” he said. “We sang freedom songs together. We wept together. It was the only time in my life that I lived in what I consider a truly integrated society, where there were no barriers.”
“I was photographing things that I wanted to photograph,” he added. “I was trying to bring to life a political movement which eventually transformed the country.”
Matthew John Herron was born Aug. 3, 1931, in Rochester, N.Y., to Matthew and Ruth (Coult) Herron. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English from Princeton in 1953.
In addition to his wife, who later became a research neuropsychologist, Mr. Herron is survived by two children, Matthew Allison Herron and Melissa Herron Titone, as well as five grandchildren.